Expert On Fine Dining Nearly Starved As Boy In Wartime Holland

September 19, 1985|by PHYLLIS GUTH , The Morning Call

With his trim mustache and urbane manner, Anton Visser, general manager of the Americus Hotel, looks every inch the suave European he is.

Looking at him today, it's hard to believe that this man, who's been associated with fine dining on both sides of the Atlantic and aboard the flagship of the Holland-America passenger line, knew what it was like to go cold and hungry as a youth during World War II after the Germans destroyed much of his native city of Rotterdam with phosphorous bombs.

Visser lights a cigarette and begins his story.

"We lost everything," the Whitehall resident says of that fateful day in May, 1940. His was one of the few families to emerge unscathed, but the next five years, he says, were "hell."

One bright spot, he says, was the three months he spent in Austria which sent Rotterdam children to recuperate in private homes from the aftereffects of the bombardment. He stayed in a home, actually a small castle with a drawbridge and moat, he says, that adjoined a hospital for high-ranking German officers.

One day they were told to expect an important visitor. With the other children, Visser was lined up to greet the man, he says, recalling that he talked to him for several minutes and shook his hand. The visitor, he says, was Hitler's secretary and deputy, Rudolf Hess, who was later sentenced at Nuremberg to life imprisonment for war crimes.

Upon returning home to Rotterdam, Visser faced reality. "We did almost anything to acquire food," he says somberly, recalling how his mother gave him her wedding band and sent him to a farm 55-60 miles away to exchange it for a 50-pound sack of potatoes. (The farmers wouldn't accept money.)

Wearing shorts and his father's old shoes, (clothing also was in short supply) he and a friend walked over ice and snow-covered roads for five days to reach the farm. On the return trip, when they were two kilometers away from Rotterdam, other hungry persons stole their pushcart and the potatoes in it, he says.

Visser made several other trips to farms, sleeping in haylofts along the way, to exchange bed linens and jewelry for food. When things were really bad, he says they ate tulip bulbs and ivy. "In an emergency, you find out what you can eat," he comments.

There were other miseries besides the lack of food. "If there is one thing as bad as no food, it's the cold." he says. In 10-degree weather, Visser continues, it gets unbearable when you have neither heat nor food.

He recalls how they cut away nonessential wooden parts of their home, such as closets, to use the wood for cooking and heating fuel. After curfew, they would go out into the streets and use a tire iron to lift up the wooden paving blocks under the tarred surface to burn them in their pot-belly stove. They had to cover their faces because of the burning tar, he remembers.

At times when there was no electricity, they burned transmission oil in a bowl, using a sliver of wood attached to a shoe lace as a wick.

"We learned how to battle and survive," he says. By 1944, when conditions were at their worst, Visser, then 14, decided to leave home, knowing how hard it was for his mother to feed the family. Visser walked to the northern part of the country, where he found work on a farm in exchange for three meals a day and attended school in the morning. Just one meal, he says, would have been a feast to him.

After the war, he returned to Rotterdam to find his family still intact and went to work in a restaurant as a busboy in one of the city's finer restaurants that had survived the war. Because the position was considered a form of training, he had to pay for the privilege of learning the trade, although he says, "The tips made up for it."

In 1947, when the Holland Lines put the its flagship, the New Amsterdam, back inservice, he attended the cruise line's school. After learning the fine points of serving, he went to work on the ship and eventually rose to the position of captain of the dining room. He recalls waiting on celebrities and royalty, including Virginia Mayo and Burgess Meredith, King Peter of Yugoslavia and Queen Juliana, before she was crowned.

"I personally gave Paulette Goddard a four-hour tour of the ship," he says.

One time during the 13 years he spent cruising around the world, he literally missed the boat. It happened one New Year's Eve in Havana during Batista's regime. When he and his friend returned to the dock at 3:15 a.m., expecting to board the tender that would take them to the ship, they learned that departure time had actually been 2 a.m.

The two presented themselves at the Dutch Consulate which arranged for them to fly to the New Amsterdam's next port of call. When the ship returned to Rotterdam, they were transferred for a brief period

Five years ago, when Visser made a cruise he found that many of the touches he had remembered were a thing of the past - the menu containing 85-90 items, printed on the ship's own presses; 200 tuxedoed waiters, three-to-four- foot ice carvings, and an eight-piece violin orchestra. "It used to be elaborate," he says ruefully.

Visser emigrated to the United States in 1960 and, except for a brief period when he operated his own restaurant, has been employed at the hotel since 1965 in various capacities. He also owned and ran the Allen Theater for several years and worked as a maitre d' at local dining establishments before going to the Americus.

At the Americus, he supervises a staff of 50, a number that is expected to increase when the renovations under way are completed.

In his free time, Visser enjoys playing the organ and the guitar. Visser, whose wife died in 1979, has a 13-year old son Adriaan. He has a daughter by his first wife.